In the live television performance the Collapse of PAL, the Angel of History reflects on the move from analog Phase-Alternate Line signal (PAL; 625 total, 576 active lines) to Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB).

She expresses a desire to restore what has been broken, but decides to remain a passive witness,
rationalizing that the end of PAL was inevitable, because the signal was “just not good enough.”

New to digital image processing, the Angel expects a final, perfect standard.
But unbeknownst to her, the digital has actually trapped her in a Hologram PenRose-Stairs to Nowhere - or what engineers simply call “Progress.“ From then onwards, she is forced to keep migrating along an endless line of upgrades, following the subsequent phases of digital image processing, while invisible traces of PAL linger, haunting ‘better,’ digital signals.

The encounter with the DCTs shifts the Angel’s focus from mapping the material of compression to researching genealogies of resolution.  

She organizes a Pique-Nique Pour les Inconnues, a conference call for all forgotten and unknown faces (shadows) featured on color calibration test cards. When the participants assemble on her desktop, the Angel quickly realizes that the group consists of almost only Caucasian women; digital descendants of Kodak’s “Shirley Card,” the industry’s default reference for skin-tone balance since the 1950s.

Together, they discover how the use of predominantly Caucasian faces for color calibration has profoundly influenced the governing standards of visual representation, failing to accurately capture and depict a more diverse spectrum of skin tones.

The Angel and the faces of color calibration reflect on how these biased standards have narrowed the range of both image capture and render. They conclude that standardisation not only organises what can be seen; it also decides what will remain unrenderable, invisible, and therefore compromised.

The gathering evolves into a desktop tele-choral of solidarity, during which the group performs Paul McCartney's “We All Stand Together,” rallying against oppressive standards. They form the institutions of Resolution Disputes (i.R.D.) De/Calibration Army. As camouflage, the group applies 365 Perfect beautification filters; deleting blemishes, enlarging their eyes and whitening their skin through countless iterations - so many times that the filters eventually “deep-fry” their images (excessively filtered to the point of distortion). Quantized into a blocky, over-saturated hue; their faces exaggerating every bias built into both beauty apps and calibration algorithms.

After the shocking revelations of “white shadows” — the racist bias hard-wired into calibration systems that rely solely on Caucasian test cards — the Angel embarks on a quest for true colour reference.

She begins by building a Rainbow Generator, to Refract a Spectrum of Lost and Un/Named Colours. However, when finally deployed, the Generator fails to produce nature’s original glitch: the continuous gradient of the rainbow.

Instead, it renders a banded, unnatural almost cartoon-like collection of color bands.

After countless hours of discouraging research into the cause of this truncation, she finally identifies the problem: the light source in the Generator was following an optimization paradigm. As energy-efficient systems narrowed standard light emission to a specific collection of discrete wavelengths, they rendered full-spectrum lamps obsolete.

While to the eye, the light in the Rainbow Generator may appear to be full-spectrum white light, in reality, it is a simulation. The light only emits a narrow band of frequencies required to stimulate the three types of photoreceptor cones in the eye, responsible for detecting short, medium and long wavelengths, a selective emission technology that efficiently supports the perception of white and colored light while actually bypassing large bands of the actual spectrum.

Ironically, the Generator proves to be a tool that illuminates forgotten frequencies, revealing the interplay between perceptual limits and the invisible quantisation of technology.

The Angel, now painfully aware that even the latest technology (from hardware to software and filters) may be rooted in fundamentally imperfect protocols, seeks a way to regain insight and control over the frequencies around her.

In an act of desperation, she considers modifying her body to overcome her perceptual limitations.
She wonders whether all she needs is a different type of eye: a sensor that is larger, slower, or more sensitive to other frequencies of light. When she finally mounts an antenna in one of her eye sockets, she gains access to an expanded visual ecology.

But the modification quickly leads her into a Whiteout: lacking the tools to decode her new visual input, she is oversaturated with noise and devoid of resolution.

The Angel finds herself in a wilderness of distortion,
at a loss of protocol,
struggling to render anything.

At the edge of an array of im/possible render vectors, she recognizes a particular grove designated as ”Wodan’s Trees” - which fork quite differently from the surroundings.

It is easy to see why the grove is named after Wodan (Odin), the cyclops god of knowledge, who sacrificed an eye in exchange for the sense of future vision. Even though the branches of the grove continue to grow, they display only an Obsolete Gamut at Zenith, indicating the end of their cycle and foreboding impending failure.

Drawn by this lore of future failure, a perspective diametrically opposed to her own fixation on past collapse, the Angel enters the grove without hesitation, hoping to learn from Wodan’s sense of foresight.

She immediately tumbles into what seems to be a Myopic double-blind. Lacking a sense of direction, up or down, forward or backward — she finds herself suspended, unaware she has fallen into the abyss of her own obsolescence.

Struck by the beam of darkness,
the Angel floats beyond her horizon

with no sense of day or night
no axis of rotation
no North or South.

...Progress, once symbolized by the Hologram PenRose-Stairs to Nowhere, has transformed into a monumental SPOMENIK of nonsensical vectors.

Nothing makes sense and nothing looks familiar anymore.

The Angel is caught in a kernel panic of her own making.

But the Angel recalls how additive complexity once drove the DCTs into kernel panic. This time, it is her who is trapped in the Upgrade Paradox, and here, no North or horizon will save her.

She studies the endless vectors of the SPOMENIK glitch, when momentarily a hint of a PenRose-Stairs breaks through. Although fleeting, this vision of order allows her to deduce that her inability to resolve must stem from one of two causes: flawed data or lack of protocol.

Cautiously, she traces the Spomenik’s dynamic edges through thick deposits of poor-resolution sediment. One shredded side opens to a viewport, offering a glimpse into a repository of render objects.

Like a media archaeologist from the future, she attempts to reconstruct a PenRose Stairs, but the synthetic data, locked in machine-defined standards, produces nothing but a blue haze of noise. She sighs: machine vision made for vision machines... 

If her tools can’t resolve this, she will need to find another framework. In a last-ditch effort, she scans frequencies that she normally mutes. When she tunes into a quiet C-band channel, she detects a faint echo: a CyCLOPS.cy corner-reflector, a technology that is part of a geospatial array that tracks surface deformations.

She feeds the SPOMENIK data into the CyCLOPS network, and immediately the system starts running adversarial comparisons between generator and discriminator modules, computing phase differentials, gradually imposing coherence to her disjointed data.

Slowly, the misalignments around her dissolve, and to her surprise, an im/possible image renders...

With her environment momentarily resolved,
the Angel finds space to reflect.

She sees now, how images are just data in process; shaped by stitched limitations, filters, bends, and breaks, imposed by the moment/um of a governing protocol,
forever deferring perfection.

Resolutions never deliver a final, static image; they are nothing but momentary myth within the procedural gospel of progress.

The Angel assumes her role as media archaeologist from the future and begins collecting various types of limits that exist within the image-render pipeline. She hopes that these lines will provide a way to start her collection of compromised, unsupported, unknown or forgotten image renders:

a scanline, a separator, a progress bar, a ruler, a mesh, an axis, a vector, a link, a loop,
...a generator, a discriminator...?

From these lines the Angel assembles a Binary Large Object or BLOb: an uncommitted form that does not move upwards, but instead dissolves hierarchy into ambiguous dimension; it is best described as a fluid stack of shifting moiré patterns. The BLOb is an ever-growing environment, or living archive for all im/possible image pipelines.


Standing in front of the BLOb, the Angel considers how resolutions not only consolidate our technologies, but also dictate constraints on how we cannot - or choose not to - use them. They shape how we render images, while foreclosing alternative imaging methods.

Her next mission is clear: she will map every limit in the image-processing pipeline to compile an Atlas of Destitute of Vision, a collection of key observations for Resolution Studies, documenting how every technology defines what remains forever unrendered and unseen.

PHASE 0000: OBSOLESCENCE OF ANALOG IMAGE PROCESSING TECHNOLOGIES

PHASE 0001: TRANSITION FROM ANALOG TO DIGITAL: THE CRISIS OF FIDELITY

PHASE 0010: THE PLATFORMED IMAGE  

PHASE 0011: THE NO LONGER STATIC IMAGE

WORKING AXIOMS